Anyone with an e-mail account is a potential reporter. The Internet has changed the media game forever. It’s a good news/bad news story.

The good news is that consumers have many more choices and more control over what news sources they prefer and how to use them. We can have customized news on topics like business, sports, politics, or entertainment, delivered to our computers and televisions twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. We decide what is important to us, and when we want to know about it.

The bad news is that there are so many more sources of information out there, and it can be difficult to sort out what’s credible and what’s not. The classic example of a news story driven by the Internet is the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. Throughout the year-long soap opera, tidbits of information spread across cyberspace like wildfire, citing unnamed yet reliable sources. Mainstream media were chasing almost every detail and reporting it as news, albeit with qualification. How does the public know what is accurate when the so called “legitimate” press is passing along rumor and innuendo?

The increased speed of the flow of information has also been dramatic. Pity the poor news director or managing editor who has to decide what is news every day! She no longer has the luxury of time in making judgments about news quality and ethics when the measure of success is getting the story first. Now she has to compete with the speed of the Internet.

We had our own taste of how technology has changed media coverage during the recent WTO debacle. In spite of our local leaders’ best intentions, in an instant the rest of the world perceived that Seattle is either a police state or a chaotic community. We’ll also be stuck with the images of tear gas and police barricades for a long time, but that’s another article.

So what does this mean for us as professional communicators? It means we have many more opportunities to reach our intended audiences. But it also means that we must be more careful and discriminating when it comes to believing what we see on the Internet. The same basic principles still apply. Like my mother always told me: “consider the source!”